A sharp spike in child poverty was reported recently by an Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) inquiry into poverty, income inequality and living standards. The report exposes how the cost-of-living and the housing crisis are both acting together to drive increasing numbers of families and children into poverty and deprivation.
Income inequality continues to grow
Average incomes are growing slowly across the workforce, but that growth is being concentrated among top earners with middle- and lower-income workers slowly falling behind. In 2024, the last available figures, incomes for the top 10 percent grew by 7%; while incomes for the bottom 50 percent of workers only grew by 3%. Low-income households are concentrated across the Western seaboard of counties Donegal, Mayo, Clare, Kerry and Galway. While high-income households are concentrated around Cork City and Dublin.
Child Poverty
This should surprise no-one. Inequality is fundamental to capitalism and clearly many in the South are falling behind economically. In the 2020s, however, the cost of housing can clearly be seen as the key factor decimating incomes and living standards. The ESRI report shows a sharp spike in poverty levels since 2018; particularly among families with young children. Rates rose from 10.7% to 20.3% between 2018-2024. This is before the cost of housing is factored in. However, once the cost of housing is included the poverty rate increases to 27%. Over one in four families with young children live in poverty.
That translates to 260,000 children living in day-to-day poverty. A scandal but one the political establishment clearly intends to ignore.
Capitalism to blame
Capitalism in Ireland is based on firmly suppressing wages and terms and conditions for most workers, particularly in the domestic economy. Many capitalists, especially those who own small and medium businesses, pay their workers’ minimum wages and deny these workers their natural rights to union membership and collective bargaining.
It says much about the levels of disinformation in the media that we have had to listen, for months, to arguments about the so-called ‘injustice’ of very modest inheritance tax increases. Something that would impact only the very wealthiest in our society. Media outlets also give wall-to-wall coverage to tax cuts in the budget, something that will again benefit higher earners the most; yet 260,000 children in poverty is yesterdays news already.
Child poverty is political. So is the housing crisis. These are also brutal examples of how class class power works in the economy and society. Neither will be solved by charity or good intentions.
Fight child poverty and the housing crisis
There are three clear immediate steps that can be taken which will attack the roots of growing poverty and income inequality levels.
First, stronger trade unions. Workers want to join unions; they want to be able to collectively bargain; they want their share of the wealth they produce. Better wages will go a long way towards eliminating inequality. We need compulsory union recognition, compulsory collective bargaining and to defeat union busting. This will require a combative approach by the trade union movement to face down the State-Business nexus which is determined to deny workers their right to union membership.
Secondly, we need rent controls now. No worker should be paying EUR 2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. No worker should be paying EUR 1,000 a month to share a house with five or six other people. No worker should have to hand over 50% or more of their wages to a landlord. Cap rents now. Benchmark rents as a portion of income.
Thirdly, we need a mass public house building project. Get workers out of the spiral of housing insecurity and precarity. Get workers into well-built, comfortable homes constructed to meet all needs; homes for single workers; small families; retired workers. We need to re-engineer the housing system around need not profit.
The role of the cost of housing in driving rising child poverty exposes the dysfunction at the heart of the economy in the South. A dysfunction rooted in capitalist exploitation and the greed for ever greater profits and rents. 260,000 children should never be living in poverty. The fact that they are, in what is statistically the second richest country in the world, exposes the callous brutality inherent in the laws of capitalism.
Militant Left will be joining the Affordable Ireland pre-budget demonstration in Dublin on Saturday 19 September at 1pm, assembling at the Garden of Remembrance, Parnell Square, Dublin.